Introduction The world is full of myths, from fake news to faux facts. Mount Everest is not the world’s tallest mountain, The Great Wall of China can’t be seen from space, and the word “sushi” does not mean “raw fish”. (It’s the vinegared rice on which the fish was traditionally served, and it’s spread to mean the sour taste of the rice - so it describes the flavour of the dishes, not the dishes themselves.)

For business owners, “Brexit means Brexit” means one thing: uncertainty.  With all economic indicators pointing towards a recession, the question isn’t so much ‘if’ the downturn will hit, or even ‘when’. It’s ‘how’ businesses will manage to survive it. Responsible business owners should now be busy making plans to weather the storm.

Each year, the UK plays host to 1.3m business events, in an industry that’s worth £42.3bn to the UK economy. However, for the purpose of this piece, we’re discussing smaller, client events - which can deliver an impressive boost to your business. If done badly, though, they can also be expensive, waste a lot of resource, and damage your reputation with your audience.

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a great website. It’s the digital representation of your brand, and the customer’s experience with it reflects on your business as a whole. Your site needs to be quick, it needs to be easy to navigate, the copy needs to be great, it needs to look fantastic, it needs to be optimised for SEO and mobile and more besides. For these reasons and more, getting it right is a bigger job than you might initially think.

If someone came to The Marketing Centre and asked us what marketing they should do with £100, we’d tell them they were asking a trick question. Effective marketing is strategic, not tactical, we’d say, and we’d have to have a good idea about their business’ goals, situation and marketplace before we could even contemplate our recommended tactic. And we’d still be reluctant to answer the question, even then, because a marketing budget should follow a business’ marketing strategy, not come before it.